Hawk Launches New AI Risk Screening Capabilities to Tackle False Positives

Hawk, the leading provider of AI-powered risk screening, anti-money laundering (AML), and fraud prevention solutions, today announced three new AI capabilities for screening, enabling financial institutions to prevent the creation of irrelevant alerts and ensure that eventual false positives are cleared more quickly.  

Risk screening has long suffered from a false positive problem, caused largely by the fuzzy matching techniques used to screen risky individuals or companies. Sanctions and adverse media teams find themselves swamped with irrelevant screening hits, which distract analysts - often working under time pressure - from the investigation of genuine risk and actual criminal activity.  

Yet the use of AI, which is ideally suited to this type of detection and investigation support, remains an untapped opportunity in screening. According to research conducted by Chartis Research and Hawk, only 16% of institutions actively use AI at scale in their screening programs, with most still relying on manual review to handle the false positives that fuzzy matching creates.  

With the launch of these three new solutions, Hawk is enabling banks and payment firms to reduce manual effort involved in processing false positives at both the detection and investigation stages: 

• AI False Positive Reduction: To improve risk screening accuracy, the AI False Positive Reduction model can be added to Hawk’s Payment Screening or Customer Screening solution to reduce false hits. It derives missing data points, such as gender and entity type, which can result in high volumes of unnecessary noise. 
• Payment Screening Agent: With fewer false positives created, the Hawk Payment Screening Agent then reviews the remaining alerts. It gathers data from internal, external, web search, and other data sources and either prepares the alert for efficient analyst review, replaces two eyes in a four-eye review workflow, or closes it as a false positive, strictly following the organization’s policy. In tests, the Agent repeatedly recognized risk in alerts that the institution had closed, thus increasing the firm’s risk coverage. 
• Customer Screening Agent: The Customer Screening Agent checks internal, external, and web search data to help prepare the alert for analyst review, or closes it strictly based on the organization’s policy. The Agents can cover a broad range of data sources faster and with greater consistency than a human analyst working alone, thereby increasing the scope and quality of the review. 

Wolfgang Berner, Chief Product Officer at Hawk, said, "For too long, compliance teams have had to cover for the limitations of fuzzy matching. Analysts spend time filling in missing data, untangling common names, and re-checking hits that shouldn't have been opened in the first place. For banks and payment firms, increasing headcount has often been the only way to maintain compliance standards as their businesses grow.” 

"Financial institutions can now use explainable AI to reduce their reliance on manual effort for payment and customer screening, while simultaneously detecting more risk. This powerful combination makes it a huge win for banks and payment firms that want to run an efficient, effective compliance operation." 

All three solutions can be deployed within weeks, enabling financial institutions to quickly realize significant benefits, with robust governance baked in. Every AI decision feeds back into rule and model tuning, so precision keeps improving over time. 

The AI False Positive Reduction model was recently recognized as a Silver Medalist in the Datos Insights’ Screening Impact Award 2026. Chuck Subrt, Fraud & AML Practice Director at Datos Insights said, “Hawk's AI False Positive Reduction delivers predictive inference of missing context and full-population attribute evaluation, enabling FIs to reduce false positive volumes, shorten hit review times, and confidently make calls on ambiguous hits.” 

The Hawk Customer Screening Agent and Payment Screening Agent are the latest additions to Hawk’s Library of AI agents, which are already delivering measurable results for AML investigations.  

Learn more about the Customer Screening Agent, Payment Screening Agent, and AI False Positive Reduction.